Cut up the ham today! Should be about 10-12 minutes to section out; took me over 2 hours, lol! I was determined to do it myself, but it just allows me to never consider meatcutting as a profession ever again! Anyways, enough complaining! The whole ham:
visible parts:
detached the hock:
Removed the aitch bone (pelvic bone):
That bone has many convolutions and can be difficult to remove. There is one 'trick' to removing it however; disconnecting the ligament attaching the knuckle bone to the socket. Once you can work your knife deep enough into the stocket and cut through that, the rest is fairly easy:
Please note the orange-handled hook - that has saved me hundreds of cuts and slashes to my fingers!
Next, remove the sirloin tip to the left of the ham, following the femur bone:
(the femur removed, sirloin tip disconnected.)
Then, split the ham in half, horizontally, cutting it into top and bottom/eye:
As you can see the parts are labeled (shank and hock are the same thing) and I circled the correstponding socket on the aitch bone and the connecting thread on it.
Noe, if you place each piece on your slicer cutting them on the line indicated:
Then slice each piece medium thin (sandwich thickness) and arrange in a spiral on a pizza platter starting with the bottom/eye first, then the sirloin tip, and finishing with the top round. Work from the outside edge to the center, lapping each slice showing a point on each layer for a party or a rounded edge for a funeral/wake. This is a boneless ham I prepared for our neighbor's loss of his wife:
I would have reversed the slices for a party.
That was something that dad was famous for, his buffeted hams. He would charge the retail of the ham plus $5 for buffeting it, and doing the very same steps: boning it out, trimming the sections, slicing it onto a 12" aluminum pizza platter and cutting out a piece of cardboard supporting it, putting a plastic red flower in the center and slipping it into a large plastic bag he bought special for them - made a very nice presentation and the $5 was more than reasonable! I'd argue with dad that he should charge more, much more to make them (as i usually got tasked to do them, lol!), but he would point out "I get full retail for the ham, my additional expense is 1¢ for the bag and 10¢ for the fake flower." I'd argue back, "How about the labor, dad?" and he'd shoot back, "...and you got something better to do, Mr. High and Mighty?!" and laugh, then grab to beers from the beer cooler and we'd laugh our butts off!
Anyways, hope that explains how to bone out and section the ham into reasonable and manageable parts! You are cutting off the hock, that's two bones. Removing the Aitch, another bone, then you have access to the femur after cutting off the sirloin tip, removing that, then splitting the top and the bottom/eye rounds.
